Sensible Explainer: Susan Dynarski

Susan Dynarski has expounded on questions of college access and affordability with fellow scholars and policy wonks for years. But lately Ms. Dynarski, a professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has been playing a much bigger stage.

That was a deliberate move. On a sabbatical last year, she says, “one of my goals was to increase my public engagement.” She can probably go ahead and call that a success.

In June of last year, Ms. Dynarski became a regular contributor to The Upshot, the The New York Times’s data-driven reporting project. In smart, plainspoken posts, she’s drawn attention to the graduation gap between rich and poor students and argued that when it comes to student-loan debt, “any proposed solution that does not focus on borrowers at for-profit colleges and community colleges will not address the core of the problem.”

While Ms. Dynarski, 50, had blogged on her own site and drafted policy proposals for the Brookings Institution, writing for the Times has brought a new level of exposure. She has used the platform to raise public awareness of important research — and to advocate for policy changes.

Take the effort to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. For years, education scholars have produced a stream of evidence that the form, known as the Fafsa, is a barrier to access; estimated how many students are missing out on financial aid; and tested ways to make filing the form easier. Streamlining the cumbersome application process has been proposed by numerous groups and is even a pet topic of a U.S. senator, but progress has been slow.

In a column this summer, Ms. Dynarski put the issue in front of more people, making the case against the “thickets of paperwork” that thwart low-income students. “We could go even further and eliminate the aid application altogether,” she wrote. “That may sound radical, but it’s not.” A Times editorial followed, “Time to Fix the Fafsa,” citing the column. Ms. Dynarski saw it on Facebook and ran outside in her pajamas to get the newspaper. It’s not every day that the economics of higher education gets that kind of press.

A month later, the Obama administration, which has long worked to improve the Fafsa, announced that students would be able to file the form earlier, using older tax data, a move widely seen as one of the biggest improvements to date.

Ms. Dynarski has also tried to shift the national conversation on student loans. The popular narrative drives experts like her crazy for painting a picture in which six-figure undergraduate debt is common and liberal-arts graduates are doomed.

The people we should really worry about, the experts argue, aren’t high-debt borrowers — many of whom hold graduate degrees and make substantial salaries — but those who, the data show, are struggling to repay their loans: college dropouts, many of whom default on very small amounts of debt.

Ms. Dynarski’s self-assigned task is to bring a more informed view of student debt to the public. The real problem with student loans isn’t the amount that students borrow, she has argued, but how repayment works. Her proposed fix? A modified income-based plan in which payments automatically rise and fall with borrowers’ income and are deducted from their paychecks.

In addition to popularizing higher-education research this year, Ms. Dynarski has also applied it. She helped design the High Achieving Involved Leader, or HAIL, scholarship, a pilot program at Michigan that is grounded in research showing that many high-achieving, low-income students don’t apply to selective colleges — but that the behavior can be changed.

Ms. Dynarski plans to continue her public engagement. In an email, she writes, “stubbornly sticking to the same topics!”

Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.